Box expands AI capabilities with apps, app builder

Today, Box Inc. joined a long list of enterprise tech vendors, including Microsoft, ServiceNow and Salesforce, in rolling out a generative AI apps platform and no-code tools with which to build them.

The twist is that Box's tools focus on metadata is not found in other platforms except Salesforce's Agentforce. Box's platform emphasizes zero-copy integration, which makes metadata an essential component.

The agents within Box can create documents; populate documents with metadata; expose metadata for other purposes, such as passing content to a sales agent in a sales portal; and, in general, automate workflows, Box CEO Aaron Levie said.

Extracting metadata and autofilling fields with it is the "big breakthrough," Levie believes. The process is typically done in a more limited fashion with intelligent document processing or robotic process automation tools. But AI can cover a lot more ground and find more metadata faster, he continued.

"This is, to us, one of the most valuable things of all time in AI," Levie said, "because this [automates] a process that companies deal with, in some cases, millions of times a year."

Box Apps can work with the user's choice of large language model and can also combine multiple LLMs in an app while maintaining user-set security protocols for information access within Box.

Over time, features such as Box Apps and Box AI Studio will become "table stakes" for many enterprise software vendors, IDC analyst Holly Muscolino said. But it's taking longer for generative AI to take hold in the enterprise than initially expected when ChatGPT first came out two years ago.

"We're seeing organizations taking it very slow because of the trust aspect [and because it creates] whole new workflows," Muscolino said. "It's a big change management issue as well."

GenAI everywhere Having so many vendors deliver their own generative AI app-building toolbox could lead to user overwhelm -- especially when tools such as Agentforce can build apps that control data outside the Salesforce platform. It can be difficult to figure out which to build on and lead users to consume too many resources if they choose the wrong one.

Levie sees Box Apps as connectors to other apps built on other platforms and also a way to preserve Box's own features, such as security policies, as data moves from platform to platform.

Muscolino believes that the Box Apps and Box Studio capabilities might help Box gain new customers from rival platforms, more likely smaller ones such as DropBox, and less likely Microsoft and Google customers. But she thinks it will also promote more use of Box in general among current customers.